One last look

Published 6:00 pm, Saturday, January 26, 2008

A few weeks ago, Vincent Harkins came to a familiar place with camera in hand.

He took some photographs, walked around, stood on an empty lot and felt something missing.

"I just thought of all the people that used to live there," he said.

His own family home, at 406 Spooner, was gone along with about fifty houses, lots and trailers: roughly 100,000 square feet crossing over into Spooner, Eagle, Main and Randall streets in North Pasadena.

Harkins now lives in La Porte, but his roots are Pasadena.

Those roots were pulled out by a demolition crew right before Christmas to make way for the new Kruse Elementary School in 2008.

"My wife and I went down there to see if there was anything left to take pictures of," he said.

Half of the Memorial Baptist Church was still there, but "everything else was leveled to the ground," he said.

Harkins moved to Pasadena in late 1930s, went to Kruse Elementary and grew up in the center of what was then downtown Pasadena.

Part of that center, his old neighborhood, is now dust and memories.

"It's devastating to look and just see all the houses and all the people that you remember living there - that's gone and that's gone," he said. "It's devastating to think that what was Pasadena, right in the heart of it, is all gone."

Harkins stood across the street, looked at the rubble, yet could still see a thriving movie theater, drug store and cafe just down the street which augmented a thriving community.

More than that, he said, he remembered neighbor's homes.

"Just to think that there aren't even any memories left of their houses, because they're all gone now," said Harkins.

He thought of the house of the Smythe sisters on the corner of Broadway and Spooner.

"Mae Smythe and Lillian and Sadie - three sisters who were all at Kruse teaching when I went there," he recalled.

Smythe was the principal and eventually became the namesake of Mae Smythe Elementary School.

Harkins' recollections of the now-flattened four-block area echo those of James and Pat McNeil, who visited the area right before they heard of the planned demolition.

James McNeil, who was Sam Rayburn High School's first football coach and later became an assistant principal at Dobie High School, grew up in the first two-story brick home built in Pasadena.

That home, on 202 South Spooner, was demolished by the city more than 25 years ago, but now the rest has gone along with it.

"It is a shame, but you can't stand in the way of progress," he said.

Places like the old Woolworth's, Pasadena Theater and the drug store were part of a generation's life-blood, said his wife.

"A lot of young people in that vicinity lived down the street from each other and they were just like kids now.

Harkins and James and Pat McNeil have more than memories of places; their recollections are pieces of their city's past.

"It's sad that people don't understand that," said Mrs. McNeil.

Songwriter Chrissie Hynde wrote about lost roots in a song called Ohio: 'I went back to Ohio; there was no downtown - it had disappeared, all my favorite places - my city had been pulled down'.

For Harkins and the McNeils' - all their favorite places were part of their own history.

"People need to stop and think about the heritage of their town, let's not let it slip away from us completely," said Pat McNeil.

Harkins will put his photos in an album for proof of existence.

"I'll have them to say, 'Well, that used to be there and that used to be there….'".